Letter to the Editor: Taxing hospitals would harm training programs

Published
3:56 pm EDT, Thursday, July 16, 2015

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Letter to the Editor: Taxing hospitals would harm training programs

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Dr. Bruce Koeppen is right to express concern that increasing taxes on hospitals can have negative effects on the training of medical students and residents (“Don’t let budget woes affect physician training”, Letters, July 4).

Teaching is a time-intensive labor of love for medical educators. If they have to take time away from their teaching to provide non-teaching medical services that will bring in money to offset that which is lost because of the increased taxes, the quality of the teaching program and the students who graduate will suffer.

In a medical school like Quinnipiac that is dedicated to training primary care doctors, this would be lamentable. For as is well-known, a shortage of primary care doctors exists and not protecting those programs that are training these physicians would be foolish.

I have practiced primary care for over 40 years and it is rare to see a medical school devote itself to the training of primary care doctors.